Once a Land Girl Read online

  Angela Huth has written eleven novels, four collections of short stories as well as plays for radio, TV and the stage. Land Girls was made into a 1998 feature film starring Rachel Weisz and Anna Friel. She is also a well-known freelance journalist, critic and broadcaster. Angela is married to an Oxford don, lives in Warwickshire and has two daughters.

  Also by Angela Huth

  FICTION

  Nowhere Girl

  Virginia Fly is Drowning

  Sun Child

  South of the Lights

  Monday Lunch in Fairyland and other stories

  Wanting

  Such Visitors and other stories

  Invitation to the Married Life

  Another Kind of Cinderella and other stories

  Land Girls

  Wives of the Fisherman

  Easy Silence

  Of Love and Slaughter

  The Collected Stories of Angela Huth

  NON-FICTION

  The English Woman’s Wardrobe

  Well Remembered Friends, an anthology (ed.)

  FOR CHILDREN

  Eugenie in Cloud Cuckoo Land

  Island of the Children (ed.)

  Casting a Spell (ed.)

  PLAYS

  The Understanding

  The Trouble with Old Lovers

  ONCE A LAND GIRL

  Angela Huth

  Constable · London

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2010

  Copyright © Angela Huth, 2010

  The right of Angela Huth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-84901-275-1

  Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon

  Printed and bound in the EU

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  For Sally and John

  Chapter 1

  ‘How much longer do you want to be starting at an empty field?’ said a voice behind her. ‘Nothing to see, is there?’

  Prue stood on the third rung of the gate, the gate she remembered for its soggy wood, which was gentle against her knees as it always used to be. She stared at Lower Pasture, empty now of animals. No crops had been sown this year. Its hedges were no longer as trimmed to the neatness Mr Lawrence had always required. The long grass bent carelessly in the wind. In the far corner she could see the haystack in flames, the petrified cows leaping away from its heat, so strong that the air quivered like a mirage. She could hear the cows screaming and the smaller voices of Stella and Ag, sticks in hand, trying to urge them into the clover field across the lane. She could feel again the piercing sweat beneath her arms as she ran on clumsy legs to join them.

  ‘Come along. We’d best be getting back.’

  Prue did not move. She needed a moment longer. The hedge that ran along the west side of Lower Pasture was now so overgrown it would have been impossible to see what she had seen that day – Stella in Joe’s arms, their two bodies sagging with relief that the fire was finally under control, but tense with the thrill of their first embrace. They had left the scene of devastation a few moments before she and Ag had linked arms, swiped at their tears, and taken a last look at the sickening remains of Nancy, the one cow that had taken a direct hit from a bomb: the one cow Mr Lawrence had agreed not to sell. Once in the clover field, Prue remembered, the rest of the herd still roared their fear – oddly high-pitched squeals from such hefty animals. They still bucked and reared, their black and white jagged skins making a mad pattern that snagged Prue’s streaming eyes. The incendiary flames had been colours of terrifying beauty, but the smoke they left behind was a vast black rock in the sky. It showed no sign of evaporating. Its vile smell was in Prue’s nostrils – even now, today, four years after some German had dropped the bomb on his way home.

  ‘I said, come on. We’ve been here long enough. Beats me what you’re staring at.’

  Prue climbed down from the gate, ignoring her husband’s offered hand. Even though he had heard something of her days as a land girl, he did not seem to understand that she was able to get off a gate without help. He knew nothing of the country. Rural life was of no interest to him though he professed he was proud that his wife had served her country as a land girl. On their honeymoon he had made a promise that one day he would drive her back to Hallows Farm, take a look at the place if it would give her pleasure. Four years later, here he was, carrying out his promise, and a god-awful day, in his opinion, it had been too, manoeuvring the Humber along narrow lanes, mud and worse splashing its pristine paint. He hoped this visit would be a once and for all: he didn’t fancy any more such journeys down these rotten little memory lanes. The only blessing was that he’d decided to bring the Humber rather than the Daimler: God knew what the country would have done to the Daimler.

  The parked Humber blocked the lane.

  ‘Lucky no tractors wanting to come down this way.’

  Barry took off an orange pigskin glove, holes punched on its knuckles, and stroked the bonnet of his car. He then gave a more cursory pat to his wife’s shoulder. He opened the passenger door for her with the flourish of one who has observed many a hotel doorman. By now Prue had become used to travelling in this huge, comfortable vehicle with its fabric seats and mahogany dashboard. Barry, so proud of his car, urged her to observe its finer details on almost every occasion they travelled together. Prue climbed in, wriggled her back against the seat. She had hoped that Barry would show some interest in the country round Hallows Farm, but the comfort of the car eased her disappointment. She wound down the window to try to reduce the permanent smell of cigar smoke.

  ‘I should close that,’ said Barry, pressing the starter button with the kind of reverence that Mr Lawrence, the farmer she had worked for during the war, had never shown to his old Wolseley. ‘Don’t want to let your country smells into a car like this.’

  Prue wound up the window. Whatever Barry asked of her, today, she would do without argument. Nothing mattered to her. She was in another time, another place – startled, shaken once again by the remembrance of it all.

  ‘So, what now? Do you want us to drive up to the farmhouse?’ Barry glanced at his watch.

  Prue knew they were in no hurry, but she had no desire to go to the house, the yard, the barn, in the company of someone whose impatience was almost tangible. This whole outing, she could see, was not Barry’s idea of fun. Besides, unknown to him, this was not the first time she had returned to the farm. Just a few weeks ago, sick of waiting for his invitation, she had come here on another visit which she thought prudent not to mention. ‘I don’t think we’ll bother,’ she said. ‘It’ll be dark soon. We’d better be getting back.’
/>   Such generosity of understanding spurred Barry’s particular kind of benignity. ‘There’s my girl. We’ll stop somewhere for a drink. Treat ourselves to something bubbly. How about that?’

  ‘Fine.’ Prue didn’t care where they stopped or what they drank. She wanted desperately to take a further look at the outside of the farmhouse, the bleak yard, the barn. But she wanted to go on her own, or with Stella and Ag. Not with Barry.

  The car moved slowly forward. Barry was unused to the hazards of lanes and he had no intention of further soiling the immaculate Humber. They passed the cottage where Ratty, the single labourer on the farm, used to live with his sometimes mad wife Edith. It had clearly been improved by new owners: window frames painted, front door a garish green that clashed with the garden. No lights in the windows. Prue wondered if the new inhabitants, despite their renovations, could sense a shadow of the misery that had soured the place when Ratty and Edith lived there.

  ‘Must be hard for you,’ Barry said, ‘coming back. Myself, I wouldn’t want to return to a place that had meant . . . whatever all this meant to you.’

  Prue shrugged. ‘Curiosity,’ she said.

  They passed the wood where she and Joe had so often made love. After Joe, Prue and Barry One had gone there for the same reason. It was a hidden place, safe. The moss had been beneath them. Birdsong, from birds they were too busy to notice, was the only sound. With Barry One, as Prue recognized at the time, it was real love in the undergrowth. When he was killed and his friend Jamie had come to console her, she had eventually agreed to sessions in the same place – out of habit, she supposed. But it hadn’t been the same with Jamie.

  Barry tightened his grip on the huge steering-wheel and accelerated gently. Prue was revolted by the pigskin gloves, which meant so much to him. They made her think of Sly, the Lawrences’ querulous old sow who had endeared herself to all three land girls. The idea of Sly or any pig turned into gloves was so horrible that—

  ‘Tell you what,’ Barry was saying, ‘I’ll run you up one of my special salmon-paste sandwiches when we get home. Lots of paste, a sprinkling of cress. How about that?’

  ‘Lovely.’

  It was dark by now so Barry could not see the tears that ran down her cheeks. She wanted to scream at him, ‘Stop! It’s left here. Mrs Lawrence will be waiting for us with a huge stew and turnips and a suet pudding.’ But in the confusion of past and present she dared not speak a word lest she broke down, and Barry’s moment of kindness would turn to impatience.

  They turned into the wider road that led from the farmhouse to the village. For a moment Prue fancied the shadows from the overhanging trees were the flock of bumbling sheep that she had so often driven down this road, and felt herself smile. Then she saw that her mind was playing tricks. There were no sheep. ‘Stupid,’ she said to herself.

  ‘I was thinking,’ said Barry, ‘that what we should go for next is a Sunbeam Talbot. How does that strike you? Lovely red machine, leather seats. Turn heads, a Sunbeam Talbot would.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Prue. She was trying to remember how many times she and Joe had shagged in the wood, and if it was more than she and Jamie had, and if they were added together they would come to more than the occasions with Barry One, whom she had loved more than either of them.

  At the end of the war, while her fellow land girls Stella and Ag went off to get married, Prue had gone back to live in Manchester with her mother in whose hairdressing shop they both worked. It was not a happy arrangement. Before the war Prue had enjoyed it, and at Hallows Farm she had kept up her skills on Stella and Ag, often surprising them with her experimental cutting and bleaching. But her years as a land girl seemed to have destroyed her enthusiasm for working all day in a small shop that smelt of shampoo and peroxide, and clumps of hair mistakenly burnt by curling tongs. She never managed to accomplish a permanent wave to her mother’s satisfaction, and now she didn’t care if she never became a skilled hairdresser, let alone under-manager in the business, which once had been her ambition.

  She spent the days dreaming of a husband who could take her away from this narrow life and provide her with money, luxury. Even though Stella and Ag had teased her over her desire for gold taps, she still hankered for them. But there were few signs of available young men, let alone those seeking matrimony. Some of the boys she had known as a child had been killed. Others had returned wounded. She would go to the pub by herself most nights, survey the gathering of old men, and return to her mother’s claustrophobic little house in a state of acute dejection.

  One day after work mother and daughter walked to the bus stop in a downpour. At the best of times buses were infrequent and when it rained they seemed to give up altogether. They stood there for half an hour, drenched. Then a large car pulled up, sloshing water from the gutter onto their feet. Mrs Lumley gave a long and noisy sigh against the rain. ‘A Daimler!’ she cooed. ‘A wedding car. Whatever can it want?’

  A man leant across the empty passenger seat and wound down the window. ‘You look like drowned rats,’ he said. ‘Can I give you a lift somewhere?’

  ‘You certainly can. Much more of this and we’ll melt.’ Mrs Lumley was breathless with the wonder of such a car pulling up beside them, its driver proposing to rescue them from the rain.

  ‘Mum, do you think we should?’ Prue, between clients, kept abreast of stories of post-war rape and murder in the Daily Mirror.

  ‘Don’t be daft, child. Two of us could beat an attacker any day. Get in quick.’ Mrs Lumley scrambled into the front seat without giving her daughter a glance.

  Prue opened the back door and fell into a seat that seemed to her more like the softest sofa.

  The man turned to her. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Fine, thanks.’ She could just see very wide-apart dark eyes above a certain pudginess of cheek.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Twenty-five Wimberly Road, if you don’t mind.’

  Prue was certain the question had been to her, but her mother’s swift reply made her realize that Mrs Lumley’s excitement at the possibility of adventure was even greater than her own.

  ‘Delighted. It’s on my way.’

  The Daimler swooshed forward, parting the deep water on the street.

  ‘I’m afraid we’ll be making wet marks on your seats,’ said Mrs Lumley.

  ‘That’s no matter. Easily taken care of

  Prue sat back, closed her eyes. Despite the discomfort of her soaking clothes this, she realized, was as near to bliss as a girl could come when she was not lying beneath a wonderful lover.

  ‘I’m Barry Morton,’ said the man, suddenly, breaking a fraction of silence.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Morton. I’m Elsie Lumley. In the back it’s my daughter Prudence – Prue, we call her.’

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘So . . . how come you have such a lovely car?’

  ‘I’m in cars. Buying and selling. Ten years from now there’ll be a very big demand for cars, all sorts. The market will explode. Mark my words.’

  ‘I see. Very interesting.’

  ‘And what line of business are you in yourself?’

  ‘I have my own hair salon: Elsie’s Bond Street Hair Salon, it’s called. Prue helps out.’

  ‘I often pass it. I’ve noticed it several times.’ He knew how to flatter, thought Prue, though it was just possible he spoke the truth.

  ‘Very kind of you to say so.’

  Prue wished the journey would never end. This was no ordinary car: this was a moving cloud, a velvet box, a jewel. Its engine made no sound. There was sheepskin carpet at her feet, tickling her wet ankles. And there, bugger it, far too soon, was their road.

  Barry Morton drew to a stop very slowly. Neither of his passengers moved. Mrs Lumley pushed back a strand of wet hair that clung to her cheek – Prue knew her mother was wishing she’d put on more lipstick before they left the shop, but she couldn’t have known that an ordinary journey home was to be transformed by a millionaire rescue
r – for presumably he was a millionaire.

  Mrs Lumley turned to him, puckering her lips in the way she did when fondling a cat, or catching sight of some man across the street whose looks she fancied. ‘Well here we are, Mr Morton. I can only thank you for your true kindness.’

  ‘Do call me Barry.’

  Why call him Barry when he was about to drive off and they would never see him again? Prue wondered. She still did not move. She wanted to remember the touch of the seat against her shoulders. She wanted to remember it when she was on the bus, or walking towards another dreary day.

  ‘Ba-rry’, said Mrs Lumley, after a pause to contemplate just how she should graft the name of this remarkable stranger on her tongue. She leant very slightly towards him, put a brief finger on his shoulder. ‘We mustn’t detain you,’ she said sadly.

  ‘My pleasure,’ said Barry. Prue could not work out the logic of his reply, but sensed he was enjoying her mother’s appreciation. ‘Let me open the door for you.’

  It would have been foolish to get out in such heavy rain when all he had to do was lean across his passenger. Prue could understand that. She watched, fascinated, as Barry leant as discreetly as a bulky man can across a strange woman and opened the door. A shaft of rain flung into the car. Prue managed to open the back door on her own, helped only by an encouraging smile from the millionaire driver. ‘You’d better hurry,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t make much difference, we’re so wet already.’

  Barry’s remark had been addressed to Prue this time, but Mrs Lumley’s quick response showed that she was now happily in charge of any remaining fragments of conversation. She gave the sort of laugh that Prue remembered had come so often to her mother before the war.

  They hurried up the concrete path, heads bowed against the wind, eyes blurred with rain. In the small kitchen Prue lit the gas fire and Mrs Lumley put on the kettle. The white walls blazed in the light of the forty-watt bulb that hung beneath a raffia shade from the centre of the ceiling. Prue remembered how she used to think this was how the perfect kitchen should be, and at first had been shocked and repelled by the kitchen at Hallows Farm, with its peeling dun walls and a rabbit waiting in the sink to be skinned. Now she thought that the perfect kitchen. Her mother’s neatness and brightness, the china plates and Bakelite mugs with matching poppies, jarred her senses in a way she found puzzling.